IMO it's justifiable when there are no solid European alternatives, but I don't really agree with an all-encompassing "pirate as much as you can" mentality. There are European authors, indie game developers etc who need to make a living and are very much worthy of support. The Buy European movement is also supposed to be about promoting our local economy, instead of just shunning American products. So I'd say think about what to pirate and what not to.
this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2025
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Absolutely. Support small game devs, musicians and film makers. Go to the cinema & concerts more often, buy or donate to artists whenever you can.
But there is little reason to keep your Netflix, Disney and Spotify subscription. Pirate things and pay your favourite artists directly. Tech companies are rent seekers who add no value and give very little back to the creators.
Already canceled Netflix and Disney
I think enshittification is mostly attributable to America. Ads on everything every possible moment, subscriptions for everything, privacy nightmares around every corner... All to scrape the very last penny from 'regular folks' while American artists, producers and study execs have so much money, they have no clue what to do with it which alienates them more and more from the people they seek to entertain.
I feel absolutely no remorse for downloading stuff and never pay for it. I can use hundreds of euros a month to far more productive ends and they sure as hell won't miss my contributions.
Somehow they've gotten us so addicted to media, we just consume consume consume. It's time to vote with our wallets and let those bastards choose which one of their seven California beach houses they are going to starve in.
In addition to this, remember that Internet companies took away your privacy. The upcoming AI revolution is being pushed to take away your agency. AI will do the research and buy things for you while you have little choice in the decision. This is why the push for AI, not because of worker productivity gains.
Few years ago, regulations around privacy forced Google into a corner and they had to start phasing out third party cookies. Tech companies came up with ways to continue harvesting user data either from the metaverse or through some other walled gardens online.
AI will make user tracking obsolete. Marketing on reddit doesn't need cookies, we can already tell what consumers like based on what communities they are part of. This will get worse with AI tools. This is why reddit stock moon'd.
I recently saw Technology Connections guy on Bluesky mention how people have forgotten to curate their online experiences, and in many cases prefer to get media delivered to them in a pre curated form.
Not only does this take away agency, it makes it a less interesting part of the media and consumer journey. Gone are the days of discovering artists on /mu/ or soulseek or mix tapes borrowed from your older sibling. You get what spotify thinks you will like.
Piracy is a great exercise in curation. You have limited space, you only download what you need and like. You most often get better quality. You get to be a part of community.
These are 'soft benefits' that don't necessarily have a monetary upside but can still be a positive experience.
Shame there aren't any European hard drive manufacturers.
Consumer HDDs are a small part of the revenue of HDD manufactures who make money from businesses and data centers. The money you spent on HDDs is much lower than what you pay for subscriptions over a period of 10 years. So you also contribute less to their bottomlines.
Yeah, I won't be putting any consumer grade HDDs in my NAS.
The money you spent on HDDs is much lower than what you pay for subscriptions
Sure ... if you compare if for over a couple of decades.
You missed the point. Consumers buying 20-30TB of capacity (even if millions of consumers do so) won't add much to their margins.
The high margin solutions are managed services where they provide end to end solutions to businesses like data centers and IT companies.
You have a source on this? I was curious and tried to look into it, but info seems to be hard to find.
I did come across this article and it states that 50% of the entire HDD market is still for desktop PCs. Not sure how much of that is between businesses and private users, but at least the marketshare of data centres seems to much lower then I expected.
https://materials.proxyvote.com/Approved/958102/20240923/AR_587276/INDEX.HTML?page=71
This is the financial report 2024 _for Western Digital. Check page 69 (naice)
Cloud revenue 5bn
Client revenue 4bn
Consumer revenues 3bn
I don't see numbers on gross margins but from what I understand about business, B2B divisions usually are higher margins than consumer divisions.
It's not European, but if one is simply looking to avoid buying American, Toshiba is an option.
Likely more options as well if one looks at the SSD market, but I am assuming there may be a reason you're looking for an HDD specifically?
As @[email protected] says, they're too expensive per TiB
There's two European manufacturers of SSDs, Wilk Elektronik in Poland and GS Nanotech in Russia.
Unless you're shitting money SSDs are not really viable for mass storage.
Piracy and Adblock shouldnโt be the default because ultimately you need to evaluate how much money is being shared with people working on media youโre consuming. Some American YouTuber isnโt really someone you want to punish when itโs the elites that you have to be concerned about. YouTube in general seems okay for most of the creators compensation-wise compared to alternatives. Maybe pay for that YouTube Premium and watch European channels so that get more funds for their operations?
Iโll add an important distinction before Iโm eaten alive. If you canโt afford it, pirate it, no questions asked. Obviously thereโs also a matter of convenience and big media companies have been fighting relentless war against it for the last couple of years. I tried to pay for everything I consume but had to fall back to my Usenet setup for downloads so often that I just stopped trying for things like shows and movies.
Adblock should always be the default because ads are often literally malware.
It's like tipping. It's a shitty system and nobody likes ads and tips and it needs to go away.
And your favourite content creator will sell his integrity to any corporation that will put a value on their content. Look at what Linus has become, it's just entertainment and clickbait. No PC builder is learning to make PCs from Linus anymore, he's busy getting clicks on 40,000$ PC that can barely play cyberpunk or potato PC that can play CS Go. Look at the honey scam, even tech expert youtubers promoted scams. I am sure this is just a few examples. Youtubers are just media companies selling ads. You can choose to bypass ads and pay a creator if you like it. But ad & sponsor blocking by default is a morally and ethically valid position and needs to be normalised.
Yeah, tipping is an alternative.
LTT decline is another topic entirely, I unsubscribed and marked all channels as โdonโt recommendโ after they stole engineering sample from some small company (which was after they โreviewedโ it with incomparable hardware).
Moreover, even when using Europa products and services you still perpetuate the culture of uncontrolled capitalism and enriching tech billionaires.
Then, if the issue is the existence of that 'culture' one should not use these apps at all, not even pirated. Because piracy of those apps still amounts to using them which make the 'culture' stronger.
Consume without paying and that does more damage to their bottomlines.
Can you remind me how badly piracy of MS Office and Windows Microsoft hurt their stock value? And how badly piracy of Photoshop hurt Adobe stocks? Yeah, not at all.
Additionally, pirate media as much as you can and be unapologetic about it. Favenooyis doing it, so can you. Pirate music, movies, books theyโre all available. Torrents community has never been safer and better organised.
Not all artists are sponsored by some billionaire, many do need to earn a living. Lucky for you if you have enough wealth to not need to get paid for your work.
That being said, everyone is more than welcome to do whatever they want. I just prefer when one doesn't try to make it look for what it is not. Piracy is not helping anyone but the pirate not wanting to pay and it's not hurting corporationsโit could easily kill an indie dev, though. Edit: as well as small indie artists.
Not everyone has the option to turn off from certain technologies. My employment requires me to use social media websites (but I can choose to block ads on them)
Piracy of MS office doesn't impact Microsoft much because Microsoft is primarily a cloud and enterprise IT company. For Netflix, Spotify and Disney, piracy would have a meaningful impact. That's why Netflix cracked down on password sharing.
Piracy isn't mutually exclusive with supporting your favourite artists. You can still go to concerts, buy merch, donate or buy physical media. I pirated three of Supergiant's first three video games, and then when I was earning, I bought the games again and played them because of how good they are. Now I buy their games on early access every time.
Not everyone has the option to turn off from certain technologies.
Never discussed that. Only reacted to the 'cultural' issue mentioned and the idea that piracy was some kind of resistance to capitalism because in my opinion it is not. At best, it is a way for people without money to access some product or service (which I have nothing against) but it certainly does not fight capitalism, quite the contrary it still fuels it.
My employment requires me to use social media websites (but I can choose to block ads on them)
If it's pro usage, and if the tool is costing money, my opinion is that it should be paid for, end of the discussion. Simply put, I know no business that does not get paid for doing their business (don't tell me you're working for free, or that your company does not send invoices to customers and does not expect to get paid?). So, since doing business is all about getting paid, it's only fair to also pay for other's business one's own business relies on. Be it a license of Word or Photoshop, or pack of ink cartridges and a stack of paper.
Piracy of MS office doesnโt impact Microsoft much because Microsoft is primarily a cloud and enterprise IT company.
In what year were released Photoshop, MS Office and Windows? And in what year did MS entered the cloud business (and then in what year did it become the dominant part of their balance sheet? And for Adobe?). Piracy was heavily going on years prior to their adoption of cloud, it still never hurt them, quite the contrary it helped them grow more.
Like I already said, I'm not against piracy (people are free). I just don't like when I see things getting all mixed up and leading to even more confusion.
Piracy is not resistance. Piracy is not paying for something that is supposed to be paid for. Resisting that model of society (capitalistic, consumerist) is a whole other thing.
Piracy isnโt mutually exclusive with supporting your favourite artists.
Like paying taxes is not exclusive to donating to charities. Still, how many among us do pay their taxes and then donate to charities? How many donate to their favorite artists?
Like reading free news online is not exclusive with paying for paid newspapers/magazines/paywalled websites. How much of us still pay for those?
Like using Free/Libre Software is not exclusive of donating to support them but how many of us do that? I would be curious to listen to devs on that matter.
Perhaps goverments could start requiring ISPs throttle connections to US services. Just a random thought. Might be a bad idea.